One reason screens don't break as easily as they used to on modern phones is because they tend to have a sturdy metal frame that the screen and backside are glued onto under tension.
This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.
I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.
Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50.
You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great.
Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
> I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
It's much easier to find the replacement part for the phone - as long as it's not more than maybe 5 years old - then it is to find the replacement part for the washing machine.
That's been my experience, anyway. Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.. but I don't have much problem finding anything else I ever want to buy on the internet.
> Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.
Usually the manufacturer has them, though they may optimize for selling to service professionals, and these days there tend to be third-party sellers more focussed on consumers, as well (and you can often get parts on Amazon.)
IME, getting the right part number is often the hardest thing, though usually docs available from the manufacturer (even for units no longer sold) can be downloaded that provide this, and lots of time searching by description and appliance model can find the part, too.
My experience with this has been terrible for e.g. circular saws & power drills, to name one example.
I had a part I needed for a Makita circular saw & Black & decker power drill. In both cases buying every replacement part would easily cost 10-20x of the retail price of a new saw or power drill, compared to maybe 1.5-2x in the case of a modern phone. The aftermarket for OEM car parts is similarly brutal for most manufacturers, but for some happy reason phones are the exception.
That happy reason is Chinese knock-off factories, which can make anything from knock-off screens to main boards, sometimes recycling some chips. If you were to go to China, you would often be able to buy every replacement part for more or less the going price of the phone.
> I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.
Can I ask what phone(s) you are talking about? I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 recently, and maybe it was just early in the evolution of these designs, but putting the screen back on with the sealant ring was the easiest part. Personally found it much harder to break the adhesive - definitely the longest step, but this was my first modern phone battery replacement.
I repaired a Nokia 8.1 and a Xiaomi Mi A2 recently. I used the (commonly used) B-7000 glue for both. It takes up to 48hrs (or more) to fully dry, I didn't wait enough so I think it dried pretty loosely on the Nokia 8.1. As a result the screen broke soon thereafter. Went better on my second try.
I think 70s-90s appliances are a lot easier to repair than phones, you usually can source the parts from a local electronics shop, and they don't require the dexterity of a surgeon to work on.
How do you source those parts? Figure out which part of the main board of your TV amplifier burned itself out with an electric meter, oscilloscope etc., and know enough about electronic repair to source a replacement resistor, capacitor etc.?
Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.
My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.
Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
I had a phone with a broken part, I went through two $45 parts before giving up and writing off the phone as a total loss. The part had a ribbon cable that you needed to thread through a hole in the case and I ripped the cable on both parts.
Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.
> I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.
Do you also think that Fairphone is “a lot more bulky” and “missing the mark”?
My mother inherited my late-2014 iPhone 6. It still gets security updates, although it won't run the current iOS.
The battery started to swell, so she took it in for a new one. They replaced it with a refurb, since they aren't authorized to do replacements of swollen batteries on-site. It cost her as much as a replacement battery would. Presumably, the original has been refurbished and someone else is using it.
If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.
> If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.
I don’t think that’s true at all. The Fairphone 2 came out the year after your mothers’s iPhone and got an OS update this year, and if she had it then she would be authorized and likely capable of replacing the battery herself.
At a cursory glance there might be. However this restriction will force companies to experiment with other designs. Maybe they'll have to use proper gaskets. Maybe phones will end up being 1mm thicker. These _might_ be negative, but IMO it's still better than the status quo: right now we're not putting a price on the hidden costs of littering the earth and wasting lithium. Ignore these externalities long enough and they will come back to bite you, the prime example being carbon emissions and global warming.
"Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.
Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size.
The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down.
Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum.
There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.
> There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers.
It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
This. Mine are: display output, bootloader unlock, waterproofing. And that's maybe three good, current phones at any given time.
Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.
Batteries also seem to be getting better in recent years, which reduces the need for them to be easily replaceable.
With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case.
But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.
Non-replaceable batteries is one of Apple’s saddest legacies. They invented this design for the iPod, and carried it over to the iPhone. Eventually it was copied across the industry.
Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1].
This is weird framing, because I have replaced about four batteries on iDevices. Two on my own, and two at a corner-store repair shop.
I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.
I never had durability issues with the phones that had replaceable batteries.
It was only with those devices where the battery wasn’t meant to be replaced where they would not go together as nicely as they did before the battery change.
I guess my point is that at least for iDevices, the batteries actually are replaceable. You just need to have a few extremely cheap tools, and a small amount of skill. Or just pay somebody else the $10 who already has the skills.
Calling them non-replaceable makes people think these devices are far less repairable than they actually are. And with the prevalence of phone repair shops, we really need to stop calling them "non-replaceable."
Certainly they can't be swapped out on a daily basis. But that's a very very different use case.
Cool, as long as we're doing anecdotes, I would constantly drop my flip phones and have the battery spring loose.
On one of those drops, the tiny plastic hinge holding the door on broke, and that was the end of that flip phone. It wasn't a popular enough model that I could find a replacement door online.
You can still make a device with easily replaceable batteries water resistant (or even water proof), but it's easier (read: less bulky) to do it with a non-replaceable battery.
Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.
Yeah, my Galaxy Xcover is IP68 (dust/water resistant) and the battery is trivial to replace. I think the situation is the same for CAT and other rugged phones.
